38 entries categorized "Television"

April 15, 2015

At some point, policemen everywhere are going to realize that there are cameras everywhere. That what they do in public will stay in public...forever. So far, there are too many cops who haven't gotten the point. They continue to perform as cops did back in the good old days when cameras were an inconvenience to carry around. The following is my Chicago Defender column on the subject.

Shoot, cops caught on candid camera

By Monroe Anderson

Michael Slager is the latest cop to get caught on camera starring in America’s most alarming reality TV series ever: Trigger happy cops playing judge and jury, publicly executing unarmed Black males.

Officer Slager was too arrogant, too cold-blooded or too stupid to realize that we now live in the Era of the Candid Camera. You virtually can’t do anything, in public or private, with absolute certainty that it won’t be recorded and that it won’t go public.

There are porn sites dedicated to videos of ex-girlfriends performing some of the most intimate sexual acts imaginable posted by rejected men seeking revenge. There are spy cameras atop streetlight poles, speed cameras hanging out with overhead stop lights at street intersections and surveillance cameras in shops and stores, all aimed to capture and record anyone breaking the law. And there are heroes, like bystander Feidin Santana, who risk their safety to record cops, like Michael Slager, who choose to use living, breathing Black men, like Walter Scott, for target practice.

In the past few days, we’ve all seen what is nothing less than a snuff flick of Slager firing eight shots at a fleeing Scott, hitting him in the back five times, then handcuffing the 50-year-old man’s motionless body before retrieving and dropping, what is suspected to be, a Taser gun next to it.

The North Charleston cop wasn’t the only shooter featured this week in a viral video.

We also saw a 44-year-old Black man shot to death by a 73-year-old white man in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Robert Bates, an insurance executive, who volunteers as a reserve Tulsa County deputy sheriff, claims he mistakenly shot Eric Harris with his handgun, when he meant to shoot him with his Taser gun.

As Harris is tackled, lying face-down on the ground with a deputy’s knee pinning his head, a gunshot rings out and Bates says: "Oh, I shot him. I'm sorry."

A sunglass camera worn by one of the deputies recorded the video of Harris’ April 2nd arrest. Against the wishes of the Tulsa County Sheriff’s department, prosecutors charged Bates, a pay-to-play cop, with second-degree manslaughter. Slager has been charged with first-degree murder.

The Zion cop who shot and killed 17-year-old Justus Howell Easter weekend is on paid administrative leave. No cameras recorded the circumstances that resulted in Howell being shot twice in the back, allowing Zion police to come up with one of the usual explanations: The teenager had a handgun.

Eyewitnesses say they saw no weapon. An investigation is underway. No video has surfaced so the Zion police have caught a lucky break. Two-thirds of all Americans have smartphones, which means all but a third of us are now armed with cameras and dangerous to cops who still believe they can do what they’ve done to Black men for generations without notice or record.

On December 4, 1968, Fred Hampton, 21, was murdered by while asleep in his West Side apartment during a Chicago police raid. Mark Clark, 22, was also killed during the predawn raid where police fired 90-99 shots.

In 1972, never quite able to get over the killing of Hampton and Clark and incensed because Chicago police were harassing two friends and supporters, who were both dentists, Rep. Ralph Metcalfe broke away from Mayor Richard J. Daley, assembling a blue ribbon panel and issuing a congressional study the next year entitled “The Misuse of Police Authority in Chicago.”

Not much resulted from that report. Between 1972 and 1991, Detective Commander Jon Burge and his midnight crew, tortured 110 Black criminal suspects, forcing false confessions. Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced yesterday (Tuesday) that he backs a $5.5 million reparations package for Burge’s victims. And an ACLU report released last month found that last summer, when the NYPD’s stop and frisk practices were all the rage, the CPD made more than a quarter of a million stops that did not result in arrests--four times that of people stopped in New York.

The CPD continues to be suspect. Two days ago, federal authorities confirmed that the FBI is investing the death of Lequan McDonald, a 17-year-old who was shot down in a barrage of bullets. The Chicago teen allegedly was wielding a knife. A dashboard camera from a squad car recorded the action and the shooter has been reassigned to desk duty.

If I were to tell you that neither the Scott nor McDonald shooting would be a case if there weren’t moving pictures, would you take my word for it?

Well, here are a few more words for the wise: Justice is beautiful, but blindfolded. So always keep your smartphone charged in case you need to show her what is or is not happening.

He wasn’t supposed to be there. All bets were on Emanuel brushing aside his four much lesser-known challengers in one fell swoop during the Feb. 24 general election.

Why wouldn’t he?

Emanuel had promise that turned into a portfolio. He was the finance director for mayoral candidate Richard M. Daley in 1989 and presidential candidate Bill Clinton in 1992. He became a multimillionaire Wall Street investment banker before returning to Chicago to win Rod Blagojevich’s U.S. House seat. In 2009 he resigned his congressional post to become President Barack Obama’s first chief of staff.

Five days before last month’s general election, Obama returned the favor by cutting a radio ad endorsing Emanuel and flying into Chicago to stump for his former badass buffer while designating the city’s Pullman Historic District a national monument. Mayoral candidate Emanuel also had a campaign war chest that was in the double-digit millions.

None of that was quite enough. Emanuel was too much the unlikable mayor, so the city’s voters didn’t like him back. He fell 4.4 points short of the 50 percent-plus-one votes needed to avoid a runoff.

So there Emanuel sat at Thursday night’s debate, side by side with challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, taking incoming flak from the man he’d bested in the first match 10 days earlier. There he sat, in this second debate, watching Garcia make a comeback by interrupting him, deriding his first four years as the city’s chief executive and even laughing at his carefully crafted mayoral message.

Garcia’s credentials were not nearly as impressive as Emanuel’s. Garcia was not even a millionaire and had no prospect of becoming one. He was a mere Cook County commissioner, a former Illinois state senator and city alderman. He was basically a community organizer daring to challenge the up-and-comer who had definitely become ... da mayor.

In the run up to last month’s general election, the Emanuel campaign spent nearly $7 million on 4,600 TV attack ads defining Garcia as the not-ready-for-the-big-time candidate. The heavy barrage has continued with TV spots attacking Garcia’s nonspecific solutions to Chicago’s $20 billion in unfunded pension debt. The mayor’s positive TV ads presented Emanuel all dressed down, wearing a Mr. Rogers sweater while admitting that sometimes he’s been a jerk but that he’s been a jerk for the good of Chicago.

The TV ads were worth every million. Polls indicate that Emanuel has shifted from a too-close-to-call status to a double-digit lead.

And yet the mayor still had to debate this interloper. Garcia, who comes off like the guy you give a big hug to right before he asks you to all hold hands and sway as you sing “Kumbaya,” was being annoyingly on the offense. The commissioner stuck with his populist rallying points, insisting that he would be a mayor who listened to the people, while Emanuel hadn’t a clue what the voters wanted or needed. Garcia charged that Emanuel wasn’t nearly as good a financial manager as his campaign claimed: If so, why was Chicago’s bond rating downgraded last month to two notches above junk status?

Emanuel still possesses all the no-nonsense, show-me-the-money charm of the Wall Street banker he once was; therefore, he is nothing if not disciplined. So he sat there, attentively listening as Garcia charged that his allowing movie mogul George Lucas to build an interactive museum on 17 valuable acres of free lakefront land was a “monument to Darth Vader.”

It had to bug Emanuel, framing a smile and acting civil throughout much of the debate, that like Garcia, the progressives in his political party were characterizing him as a mayor who could not care less for the little people, simply because he quid-pro-quoed his corporate contributors big privatization contracts. Too many in Chicago were beginning to refer to him as Mayor 1%, just like the book with the same title.

Rahm sat during the hour long debate, methodically sticking to his script. Sure, he closed 50 schools in poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods, but “our kids have a full school day of kindergarten,” he said. Sure, he closed half the city’s mental clinics, but “we added more spaces through federally qualified entities.”

Between the school and health-clinic closings, Chicago’s black voters aren’t as crazy about Emanuel as they were four years ago. The Rev. Jesse Jackson and many of the city’s other black leaders are going with Garcia. Fortunately, Emanuel invested wisely in some key black ministers, politicians and businessmen. They may well balance out the decisive black vote that will determine the winner.

When the debate ended, it was two down and one to go. The last one is tomorrow. The election is April 7. After that, the mayor can wave goodbye and become himself again.

Cybercolumnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

March 20, 2015

The first of three Chicago runoff mayoral election debates took place Monday night. Rahm Emanuel outperformed his challenger, Jesus "Chuy" Garcia. But there are two debates in a little over two weeks before we'll know who's the last man standing. Here's my Chicago Defender column.

Chuy win over Rahm still debatable

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

Jesus “Chuy” Garcia had to do just one thing during Monday night’s first mayoral debate: Channel his inner Harold Washington to show Rahm Emanuel and the rest of Chicago who was the boss.

Mission unaccomplished.

Garcia came off as the man who would be mayor. Emanuel came off as the mayor.

In a testy verbal battle between Commissioner Congeniality and Mayor Meany, both men made valiant efforts to go against type. It was obvious that Emanuel was working hard at being more likeable. It was just as apparent that Garcia was attempting to be No Mas Mr. Nice Guy. At the same time, each man was out to typecast the other.

Without name calling, Garcia, the community organizer, reminded voters why there is a book out there entitled, Mayor 1%.

“Chicagoans need to know that this mayor has provided corporate welfare to his cronies, millionaires and billionaires, in Illinois in terms of tax increment financing and that he promised four years ago to put Chicago’s fiscal house in order,” Garcia said. “We’re in a financial free fall. The city has been downgraded, three of its agencies over the past two weeks, to near junk bond status.”

Cook County Commissioner Garcia charged that while “trying to talk in a sophisticated way,” the mayor wasn’t saying anything that would help any Chicagoan who wasn’t physically or professionally in the Loop.

Mayor Emanuel, chum to the corporations, was far smoother than Garcia but just as combative while sticking to the story in his TV attack ads charging that his runoff challenger is all Windy City planner with no specifics on how he intended to get things done.

The mayor even threw in a short lecture. “The difference between being a legislator,” said Rahm, once a Congressman, to Chuy, once a state senator, is “you pass a bill. When you’re the mayor, you have to pay the bills.”

Throughout the hour-long debate the mayor stuck it to Garcia for not being specific while glued to talking points that sounded more specific than they actually were. Neither candidate has presented a scenario that would hoist Chicago out of the deep financial hole that 20 plus years of Mayor Richard M. Daley dug for the city. Garcia wouldn’t say whether he will or will not raise property taxes. Emanuel who once said that property taxes were the last resort, now says they’re off the table.

The mayor has let his $15 million war chest do the talking. A constant barrage of TV ads telling Chicagoans that Garcia hasn’t a clue and others, with the mayor in a Mr. Rogers sweater explaining that while he may be a jerk, he’s our jerk appear to be working. An Ogden and Fry poll Saturday showed Emanuel at 47.1 percent, compared to Garcia’s 37.6 percent. A Chicago Tribune poll released the day before reported Emanuel at 51 percent and Garcia at 37 percent with 11 percent undecided.

In order for the mayor to win another term all that may be required for the next 20 days is for him to keep up the attack ads while playing nice. Saturday’s endorsement by the powerful Service Employees International Union should deliver Garcia more money and an army of campaign workers but he’ll still have to throw more elbows.

The mayoral challenger needs to rally the old Harold Washington coalition of Blacks, Hispanics and progressive whites. But more than anything else, Garcia will need to get out the Black vote.

To do that, he needs to hold news conferences in front of one or two of the 50 closed neighborhood schools. While at one of them he needs to point out that Emanuel’s closing of the six mental health clinics was just one more blow to the same low-income neighborhoods impacted by the school closings. He needs to talk about how, as with the parking meters under Daley, Emanuel has privatize the CTA fare system, thus killing another of the city’s geese that should lay the taxpayers golden eggs.

Garcia needs to emphasize and re-emphasize that unlike Mayor Washington, Mayor Emanuel has not been not fairer than fair while waving the Chicago Sun-Times report that whites continue to dominate the city’s highest paying jobs at City Hall and throughout city government. Among Chicago’s 32,500 city employees, 46 percent are white, 31.8 percent are Black, 18 percent Hispanic and fewer than three percent Asian.

These are the specifics Garcia should be addressing, not suggesting improbable fixes to what is nearly an impossible problem--pulling a $9 billion rabbit out of the hat. He’ll get a second chance next Thursday at the second mayoral runoff debate.

February 26, 2015

For the past Century, Hollywood and African Americans have had a star-crossed relationship with the movie industry waging an image war against Blacks. Here's my Chicago Defender column on this sad situation.

Selma boycotted but Hollywood still got Glory

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

Hollywood’s snub of the very important Black film, Selma, about the extremely important march to demand voting rights for African Americans 50 years ago, was so absurd, so ironic, that it was joke worthy.

On cue, Host Neil Patrick Harris literally opened Sunday night’s 87th Academy Awards show with this pale one-liner: “The best and the whitest...sorry brightest.”

It was a feeble attempt to sugar coat the bitter truth. Although the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, is a Black woman, the actors nominated for best performances this year were all white.

The Blacks-are not-worthy judgement was determined by the Academy voters who are 94 percent white. Last month’s Golden Globe Awards paid a little homage at least. David Oyelowo’s brilliant performance as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ava DuVernay inspired direction at least garnered two nominations.

“Why are we still begging white people for approval?” asks Sergio Mims, who writes for a Black film website, Shadow and Act, and is a co-founder of Chicago’s Black Harvest Film Festival, before shrugging off the Oscars brush off as no big deal.

Mims might be right. There are the obvious bragging rights, but there is no guarantee that an Oscar will get an actor more work or a higher salary.

And long after all the sound and the fury over this year’s Oscars have come and gone, the real action will remain where it already is: at home on our big flat-screen TV sets.

Going out to see a movie, with servings of popcorn, soda and candy, can cost a family of four as much as $80 so we’re staying away in droves. According to a CBS News Poll, 84 percent of Americans see movies at home, four percent at the theater and 10 percent pretty much divided between home and the theaters.

Television is also giving the theatrical movies a run for the fame and fortune as far as actors and producers are concerned.

More than two and a half viewers watched Laurence Fishburne’s Hannibal every week as the veteran Black actor pulled down $175,000 per episode. Fishburne is also a co-star along with Anthony Anderson on the TV sitcom, Black-ish. He and Anderson are also producers..

Producer Lee Daniel’s new drama, Empire, starring Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson, has been building its viewership from week to next. The Hip-Hop mogul show, which MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry summed up as a combination of Breaking Bad, Glee, House of Cards and The Real Housewives, is the new “it” show for Black viewers.

Since she created Grey’s Anatomy, Writer and Producer Shonda Rhimes has her own cottage industry on network TV with Private Practice and Scandal. She is also an executive producer on How to Get Away with Murder, the new TV drama that last month earned the show’s star, Viola Davis, a Screen Actors Guild Award.

More than nine and a half million viewers watch Kerry Washington’s Scandal religiously. She reportedly earns $150,000 per show which means no one’s going to be throwing a rent party for her anytime soon. But, this is where the money gets really funny. While the audience for ratings champion, The Big Bang theory, is twice that of Scandal, all three of the white stars, Jim Parsons, Kaley Cuoco, Johnny Galecki are paid $1 million each per episode.

That’s entertainment. Hollywood won’t be winning many awards for treating African Americans fairly over the past century. America’s movie industry has been waging an image war on Blacks since D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation first hit movie theaters 100 years ago. Griffith’s movie, originally named The Clansmen, espoused white supremacy while glorifying the KKK. One scene features white actors in blackface who are supposed to be newly elected Black legislators during Reconstruction, sitting around, barefoot, eating chicken, drinking whiskey and recklessly eyeballing white women.

Donald Bogle’s, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, pretty much sums up much of Hollywood’s presentation of Blacks well into the 1980s.

It’s that history and what took place on the Pettus Bridge that brought tears to some in the audience as they watched John Stephens and Lonnie Lynn-- aka John Legend and Common--perform, and later accept Oscar for Best Original song, Glory.

“We know that right now the struggle for freedom and justice is real. We live in the most incarcerated country in the world,” Legend said during their acceptance speech. “There are more black men under correctional control today than were under slavery in 1850. When people are marching with our song, we want to tell you that we are with you, we see you, we love you, and march on.”

Common and Legend are right on. The struggle continues. But every now and then, we do get to witness some glory.

You may remember General Platt from American Idol when he performed "Pants on the Ground," a whamit, bamit, cut-it-out damnit song about young men wearing baggy, saggy pants.

And, of course, Wannabe New York Governor Jimmy McMillan of the Rent is Too Damn High Party is the media story du jour after yesterday's gubernatorial candidate debate.

If I had my show, the three of us could talk politics and culture. We could talk about how the war on drugs and the outsourcing of unskilled jobs have produced a guns and drugs commerce in the nation's inner-cities that has led to a prison culture in America from inner-city to suburb to farmland to the world.

After that, the three of us could discuss how Reaganomics and deregulation has led to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Of course, I'd drop in the fact that the CEO compensation ratio to worker was 24 to 1 in 1965 while today it's 300 to 1, therefore highlighting one reason the rent's definitely too damn high.

Unfortunately, I no longer have a TV show, so I'll just have to have Platt and McMillan as my guests right here, right now.

October 18, 2010

I was a columnist at a major American newspaper nine years before three black East Coast columnists brought "the idea that a group of black columnists would come together to share our common experience and probe the soft underbelly of our craft" to fruition in 1992.

By the time these three men had formed The Trotter Group, I was no longer writing a signed, op-ed column for the Chicago Tribune but had moved on to a post as a department head at WBBM-TV and the executive director and host of Common Ground, a public affairs TV talk show.

Five years ago, I was back in print, writing a signed, op-ed page column for the Chicago Sun-Times. It was during that time that I became a member of The Trotter Group.

I've gone into my ancient history because of current events that are still unfolding.

Ten members of The Trotter Group met in the White House with President Barack Obama and other key staff a few days ago. I only learned of the meeting after fellow Trotter, Robin Washington, the editor and a columnist at the Duluth (Minn.) News Tribune--with whom Obama spent a better part of a day for an interview 20 years ago, even cutting class at Harvard Law--sent me an angry Facebook message questioning how certain Trotters were selected to attend the meeting and others were not. While I didn't receive an invitation at all, other Trotters were invited then dis-invited. As a result, travel plans had to be changed and there was considerable explaining to do to the editors who had signed off on the trips to the White House.

So far, the aftermath has fallen just short of that old axiom: Hell has no fury like a columnist scorned. But just barely.

There has been a flurry of emails between Trotters criticizing the selection process. Trotter member Faye Anderson (no relation), didn't write about it on her blog, Anderson@Large but did discuss it on her Facebook page. Under the headline, Did White House Decide Who Represents Trotter Group?, Trotter member Richard Prince brought the controversy to light in his Journal-isms column.

And, of course, I've just written about it, here, on my political blog. This may be the end of the story. Then again, it may not be.

March 10, 2010

During yesterday's fleeting hour, while he was interviewing the very troubled former New York congressman, Eric Massa, Glenn Beck was out of his mind.

This was the first time the whining, weeping conservative talk show host sounded, sounded, sounded, well.....thoughtful as he tried to get freshly-resigned Massa to dump all over his fellow Democrats and the Obama Administration.

Any other time Beck favors staying stuck on stupid, saying stuff like President Barack Obama is a racist who "has a deep-seated hatred for white people."

As Media Matters points out, Beck "has flirted with the idea that FEMA is building detention camps,
suggested that President Obama is purposefully "tanking" the economy to
force young people to work for ACORN and AmeriCorps, and said that
Obama and former President George W. Bush are 'moving us away from our
republic and into a system of fascism.'"

Beck, who was named Media Matters' Misinformer of the Year, also thought the Tea Baggers march on Washington was 1.7 million strong--about seven times as much as the number of anti-reform protesters that actually showed up. He apparently thinks the ideas enumerated in his banal 912 Project, with its nine principles and 12 values, are something new, necessary or profound.

But right after I saw Beck's broadcast yesterday, which left me hoping against hope that he wasn't the dullest knife in the drawer, I read that on Monday he was urging the listeners of his syndicated radio show to leave churches that preach social justice.

As it turns out, Beck thinks that the term many Christian churches use to describe efforts to tackle poverty and promote human rights is a "code word" for communism and Nazism.

Who would dare think the teachings of Jesus Christ were the ambitions of commies and Nazis? Glenn Beck.

February 17, 2010

Barack Obama has been POTUSfor less than a year and a month and already the wingnuts have launched a slew of wacky Impeach Obama campaigns.

In Wisconsin, an Impeach Obama billboard mysteriously appeared last week on U.S. 41 near the Oshkosh Correctional Institution. And what are the grounds for this call to remove our nation's first African American president?This punch line on the billboard explains it all: "America's small businesses are failing. Help us spread the message."Oh, sorry, that was no punch line, thesesorry folks aren't joking. There's also the Impeach Obama Campaign.com website that claims to have "Over 100000 signatures and growing." Go there and you'll be able to read the revealing reasons why America's legally elected head of state should be removed from office:

Radio-personality Tammy Bruce may have said it best:

"... ultimately, it comes down to... the fact that he seems to have, it seems to me, some malevolence toward this country, which is unabated."

Speaking of the best sayings of vitriolic, slime-spewing right-wing radio personalities, there's Michael Savage who demands that we "Impeach Obama now. Stop him before he kills this country."

Savage's padded-cell rants are kissing cousins to what's being sung by some jackleg rock group called Sleuth. If you're into poorly performed songs with poorly written propagandistic lyrics, then the group's Impeach Obama is the song for you.

Why do a plurality of Republicans, according to a Daily Kos poll, want Obama impeached? Why is there this wingnut zeal to topple America's freely elected leader?

Has he been convicted of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors? Nope.

Has he lied to our citizens about WMDs so that we could invade and occupy an oil-rich, Muslim country in the Middle East? Au contraire.

Has he broken U.S. and International law by allowing POWs to be tortured in violation of the Geneva Conventions treaty? I don't think so.

Has he even been caught lying about getting some head in the Oval Office? No. No. No.

So why--just one-fourth through his presidential term--are these crusades to remove the Leader of the Free World out there?

Keith Olbermann, my favorite cable TV host on the "whites only" MSNBC line-up, summed it all up in a special commentary, "Beware fear's racist temptation," on Countdown last night. His commentary, I think, got to the heart of conservative America's thinking and to the soul of the Impeach Obama fantasy.

February 01, 2010

Besides holding down her job as my wife and mother of my two sons, Scott and Kyle, Joyce Owens is an artist and a professor and curator at Chicago State University. When she's not eyeballs deep in one of those five jobs, she takes time out to curate an exhibition for Sapphire & Crystals, a collective of African American women artists here in Chicago.

Without fail, this is the time of the year when the S & C's can bank on an exhibition somewhere. Black History Month really is predictable. And without fail, this is the time of the year when I was a captive sounding board, forced to hear Joyce complain about how this was the only time of the year that it occurred to white galleries, universities and community centers that showing art by black women is a good thing to do.

I understand all too well.

Although I'm available year round, my best speaking engagement in 2009 was a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr./President Barack Obama Celebration for the City of Chicago Height, Illinois. Of course, Obama's Inauguration was a true historical moment. The King Holiday and Black History Month, on the other hand, have become as regular as a Gregorian Calendar. The two African American observation's have sort of blended into Black History Season, which begins the day after Christmas for Kwanza and rolls on through the end of February. As for the rest of the year--forget about us.

I was reminded of this peculiarity when I read the latest post of my friend Jack White, Buckwheat's Black History Month Tour, on the Washington Post's black website, The Root. This visit to "the Home of Retired Racial Stereotypes" is a funny as Jack's drop in last April. Check it out and then tell me--if you can--why Black History Month shouldn't be integrated into American history, 24/7/52?

Here's Jack's post:

Buckwheat’s Black History Month Tour

By: Jack White

Posted: February 1, 2010 at 6:38 AM

Forget all the black public intellectuals. The Our Gang character has a few things to get off his chest.I came
across Buckwheat packing a Kente cloth suitcase in his suite at the
Home for Retired Racial Stereotypes. He was softly humming, “On the
Road Again.”

“My annual Black His’try Month speakin’ tour!”
said my diminutive friend in a high-pitched voice as he carefully
folded a colorful dashiki and placed it in the valise.

“This the month when black public
in-tee-leck-shals like me rakes in ‘nuf speakin’ fees to pay the bills
the rest of the year when nobody wants to hear nothin’ we got to say,”
said Buckwheat. “It’s kinda like bears eatin’ ‘nuf salmon durin’ the
spawnin’ run to get them through the winter.”

“I never thought of it like that,” I observed.

“Where will you be chowing down … I meant, speaking?”“Oh, I’m booked solid,” said Buckwheat proudly.
“I’m as pop’lar as Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson,
Melissa Harris-Lacewell and Clarence Page put together. I got a Black
His’try road show with a bus and everythin’! ”

“But how could you possibly compete with such a gallery of brilliant minds?” I asked, skeptically.

“All of them just talks ‘bout black his’try,” he ranted, his voice rising into higher and higher registers.

“I lives it. I don’t just talk about racial
stereotypes—I IS one! Nobody can say ‘Here I is’ or ‘Otay’ like me!
Those are MY trademarks!!! I is an icon!! I is an original!!! WHEN YOU
SAY BUCKWHEAT, YOU SAY BLACK HIS’TRY!!!!!”

His tiny fists were pumping in the air, and he was
shrieking at such a high pitch it fractured the crystal glasses in the
dining room.

“Is that so,” I remarked.

“Yeah, and I got a book comin’ out to prove it. It’s called The Negro Squeaks of Rivers,” Buckwheat boasted. “PBS is plannin’ a 19-part series based on it. They think it could be bigger than Roots.”

Just then, I heard the growl of an engine and an
enormous red, black and green touring bus pulled up at the door. It
looked like the Kingfish was at the wheel.

May 18, 2009

When this year's Superbowl champions, the Pittsburgh Steelers, run through the meet and greet ceremony Thursday at the White House, the team's star linebacker will be sitting it out. James Harrison says that he's not going to the Nation's Capitol to hang out with the nation's first African American president because....well, because....WTF?

"This is how I feel -- if you want to see the Pittsburgh Steelers, invite us when we don't win the Super Bowl. As far as I'm concerned, [Obama] would've invited Arizona if they had won," Harrison told WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh.

Has this player suffered one concussion too many? Had the Cardinals beat the Steelers in Superbowl 43, then President 44 would have been glad-handing with them in the Rose Garden. That's the way it works. The winners gets to the White House. The losers gets to go home. So, yeah, without Harrison's record 100 yard touchdown return, and an Arizona, 23, Pittsburgh, 20, final score, the Cardinals would have gotten the Barack Obama invite.

It was pointed out that Harrison passed on going to Washington three years ago, the last time the Steelers won the Superbowl, to meet with President George W. Bush. Harrison's agent insists that his client's decision to skip the trip to Washington wasn't political. The agent should have insisted that it was downright stupid.

Actually, his agent should have explained it all to his client like he was a six-year-old. If you win the Superbowl, you get a Superbowl ring. If you lose, the other team gets it. If you win, your team gets the Superbowl trophy. If you lose, the other team gets it. If you win, you get to be in the Superbowl parade. If you lose, the other team's town has a parade for them.

If you win the Superbowl, then you get to go to Disney World.

My guess is that since Harrison won, he's been there and doesn't want to ever, ever leave.